A human's rambling.

Changes I would like to see in Quora

I love Quora…Rather loved Quora… now I visit it only when I have lot of free time to kill. It was once my favourite site to fill my hungry brain. Quora was a knowledge trove, now it has also become an entertainment site, the ones with the most innovative answers and good writing is a winner.

Though it is an amazing crowd-puller site, I suspect its crowd retention capability.

It is so annoying to see things you are not interested in, the ones you would consider trash landup in your wall. The worst part would be, in order just not to miss a few gem Q&As I will have to go through few thrash. No offence, but requirement of people are different, and the requirement itself differs from time to time for the same person and Quora needs to step up to fix their usability…else see a lot of walkouts.

Things they can work on.

Categorization of topics.

Let us say I am interested in the topic of health. It is a huge topic and there are lot of things that it would cover. So eventually what happens is that your wall gets flooded with topics you wouldn’t be interested at all. This can be especially annoying for the members who have been around for long. Say I liked a topic, the topic tends to get populated with sub-topics and as they do the wall gets flooded. This causes me to waste a lot of time in just ignoring topics I am least interested in. Or to continue using I will have to keep unfollowing topics as every day pass by. Would users have the patience to do this? or rather walk out of Quora. What can be done is, when one follows a parent topic, the list of subtopics can be displayed to choose from. And a system to notify of the new sub-topics added to the followed topic, to know what we can expect and an option to unfollow if need be.

Example, I wouldn’t want to follow questions like the one below because I like to read about India.

Monitoring of questions on Topics.

The volunteers are already doing a great job. But a understandable and descriptive one would be more useful. Does a matter of opinion really fall under ‘Fashion and Style’?

Subjective and Objective answers.

This is an another huge hindrance. Over the period of time, I see subjective answers becoming more popular than objective ones. I don’t mean objectivity is required in every aspect of topic and the answers provided. But a mere compartmentalization will help. Ofcourse, there is a very thin line between subjectivity and objectivity, but can you say a proven theorem is subjective? Or a question ‘what happen to your hair without shampoo’ as objective?.

Suggestions.

A better algorithm for suggestions. The suggestions are really bad.

I have no idea why the above topic was suggested to me. Is it based on people I follow? Or topics I went through? I am still perplexed.

This post is not meant to be a sham, I love Quora and just want it to be better. A place I can come back to read what I am interested in and not land up spending time in unfollowing topics or filtering through the wall.